AgileThought · Client: LabTech Software · IT operations · 2013
Two hundred machines, one admin, one screen at a time.
LabTech (later ConnectWise Automate) is remote monitoring and management: the tool a managed service provider uses to watch, patch and fix hundreds of client machines they'll never physically touch. The product was powerful and looked like the Windows utility it had grown out of. I redesigned it around the admin's actual workday: triage first, density without noise, and the health of a machine readable in seconds.
The short version
- An RMM admin's job is triage. The dashboard leads with what's wrong (blacklisted software, failed pings, missing patches) and lets everything healthy stay quiet.
- Density is a feature in admin tooling. The redesign keeps the information rate high and spends color only on state.
- Designed admin-first for native Windows, because that's where these people live all day.
01 · The problem
Powerful, trusted, and a decade behind its users
MSPs ran real businesses on LabTech, and the interface taxed them for it: every answer was three dialogs deep, and the visual language treated a failed server and a healthy one with the same gray. The redesign started from the admin's questions, in the order they get asked. What broke overnight. What's about to break. What's out of patch policy. Each machine's dashboard answers those before anything else, with drives, processes, devices and alerts as glanceable modules and a performance score to triage by.
The constraint I remember most is restraint: in a console this dense, every color has to mean something. Green is healthy, amber is drifting, red-orange is on fire. Nothing else gets a color, which is what lets those three do their job.
02 · What shipped
The machine dashboard
A single machine's console. Blacklisted software and failed pings surface first, patching shows its arithmetic (missing, approved, pushed, failed), and the performance score gives the admin a number to sort a fleet by. Dark, dense and quiet on purpose.